1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a control channel resource allocation method and apparatus of a mobile communication system and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for allocating resources of a Common Control Channel (CCCH) with a Dedicated Reference Signal (DRS) in a mobile communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile communication systems provide subscribers in motion with voice communication services. With the rapid advance of technology, the mobile communication systems have evolved to support high-speed data communication services as well as the standard voice communication services. However, the limited resource and user requirements for higher speed services in the current mobile communication system has spawned the growth of more advanced mobile communication system.
Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) are being standardized as the next generation mobile communication system of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). LTE-A is a technology for realizing high-speed packet-based communication at about up to 1 Gbps, aiming at commercial deployment around 2012. To this end, discussions are being held on several schemes such as network multiplexing for deploying multiple evolved Node Bs (eNBs) overlappingly in a specific area and increase of frequency bands supported by an eNB.
In LTE, the control channel is designed based on the distributed transmission concept, which aims to minimize and distribute inter-cell interference and maximize frequency diversity gain. LTE-A is designed in consideration of the environment having high inter-cell interference probability due to the very closely deployed cells. Accordingly, the control channel designed based on the distributed transmission scheme has a drawback of inevitable inter-cell interference.
Particularly in LTE-A supporting MU-MIMO transmission, it is difficult to fulfill the performance requirement with the control channel designed for LTE. For this reason, a new control channel is required and, as a consequence, recent studies are underway to suggest a method for transmitting the control channel at a specific frequency region. This region is User Equipment-specific (UE-specific) so as to be transmitted with a dedicated reference signal. This requires the introduction of a new control channel as the UE has to receive both the command and dedicated control channels.
The common control channel should be designed so as to be received by all UEs on the same resource and thus, in using the dedicated control channel, there is a need of a method for transmitting/receiving and demodulating the signal transmitted on the dedicated control channel.